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MikeWaters · 02-13-2009, 06:23 PM

American academics, undergraduates to full professors, are churning out vast quantities of literary criticism as theses, dissertations, articles, reports, peer-reviewed journal articles and books.

To what end?

Surely most of it is ignored, because it is worthless.

But what of the "worthwhile" literary criticism? I suppose at a certain level it tackles art and answers the question "what is this?" And also "what is important?"

Imagine going onto the internet in 40 years and coming across a thread about "The Road." You want to add your 2 cents. There are more than 1,000,000 replies in this thread. Luckily, someone has parsed this thread and boiled it down to the 200,000 most important replies. Now your job is to make your comment about this book, in the context of the 200,000 important previous replies in the thread. The better you are able to understand the history, the arguments, the schools, and then say something new, the more important your reply will be.

Good luck.

02-13-2009, 06:23 PM	#1
MikeWaters Demiurge Join Date: Aug 2005 Posts: 36,365	What is the importance of literary criticism? American academics, undergraduates to full professors, are churning out vast quantities of literary criticism as theses, dissertations, articles, reports, peer-reviewed journal articles and books. To what end? Surely most of it is ignored, because it is worthless. But what of the "worthwhile" literary criticism? I suppose at a certain level it tackles art and answers the question "what is this?" And also "what is important?" Imagine going onto the internet in 40 years and coming across a thread about "The Road." You want to add your 2 cents. There are more than 1,000,000 replies in this thread. Luckily, someone has parsed this thread and boiled it down to the 200,000 most important replies. Now your job is to make your comment about this book, in the context of the 200,000 important previous replies in the thread. The better you are able to understand the history, the arguments, the schools, and then say something new, the more important your reply will be. Good luck.